Romney’s claim is based on a local interview Obama gave in Iowa, in which the president was told by a reporter that a local company had closed and was moving jobs to Wisconsin because of Obamacare. Obama reacted with incredulity, noting that the law’s provisions impacting such a company haven’t been implemented yet. That led Romney to remark that Obama “didn’t understand that Obamacare was hurting small business,” and “you have to scratch your head about that.”

ABC News did a good fact check of this claim, noting that Romney had distorted what Obama said. But it gets better still.

It turns out that the company didn’t close because of Obamacare at all, according to a company spokesperson. What’s more, the company sees lack of demand as the key problem — a lack of demand that is partly due to the drive to repeal or modify Obamacare, not to the implementation of the law itself.

The company in question is called Nemschoff Chairs, and it manufactures a whole range of health care furniture for waiting rooms and so forth. Around 100 jobs are being moved out of Iowa as part of a consolidation with another plant in Wisconsin, where around 50 of those jobs will be preserved.

But Obamacare’s implementation had nothing to do with the decision, Mark Schurman, a spokesman for parent company Herman Miller, tells me.

“We never said health care reform is the reason we’re closing and consolidating that operation,” Schurman said. “We never said it’s the result of the health care reform legislation.” [Emphasis added.]

D'oh! Looks like Lyin' Willard (TM) has struck again. He's so determined to distort the truth about the health care law that he'll seize on anything that he thinks will be of advantage. But don't think that because he's been slapped down on this lie that he won't tell it again and again.

1 comment:

They select a remnant, a tiny piece of information, a statistic, and say, now, how can we make up a good anti-Obama about this? What? You say it's a lie? So what, as long as it puts him in a bad light, that's all we care about.